Seven Sharp is not current affairs so much as infotainment. I don’t have a problem with that because I am not sure enough happens in NZ for a daily current affairs show. This leads to manufactured stories and the like.

Related posts:

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2013 at 2:00 pm and is filed under New Zealand.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.

24 Responses to “Current Affairs shows”

In August 2012, the Auditor-General received a request from Clare Curran MP to inquire into four purchases of railway rolling stock by KiwiRail in recent years. In all four cases, rolling stock was purchased from China Northern Locomotive and Rolling Stock Industry Corporation (CNR). Correspondence from Ms Curran in November and December 2012 raised further concerns about the value for money of these purchases and the effect of the purchases on the future of KiwiRail’s workshops in Hillside, Dunedin.

Our assessment

To assess whether the questions raised by Ms Curran warranted a full inquiry, we met with some relevant staff and obtained background information from KiwiRail on each purchase. The work involved in large purchases of this kind can extend over several years; we have therefore reviewed a substantial amount of documentation dating back to 2005. Because of the passage of time and the change in ownership of the company in 2008, we were careful to then take the time to locate and access the relevant records and people at KiwiRail who had been involved. Given the highly technical nature of the purchasing process, we used specialist assistance to complete our assessment.

Conclusion

We have carried out enough preliminary work to be satisfied that there is nothing to suggest that decisions to purchase locomotives and wagons from CNR were made for anything other than normal business and commercial reasons. The processes followed by KiwiRail appear reasonable, the relevant evaluations have been carried out properly, and we have seen no evidence to suggest improper influence over these decisions.

20/20 is mostly infotainment – we it used to be but I havent watched it for some time.
Sunday tried the shock horror method. Dont know if it worked

The trouble with so many of these programmes is that they usually introduce them selves as having some amazing exclusive story which will change the world….
usually turns out to be some overseas thing about some dopy story that someone would have had to search long and hard to find – meaning the people involved are way out on the edge and arent anywhere near the centre of the bell curve.

Stories about wierd pets or particularly fat people or nose flute players from Egypt, etc. that sort of stuff isnt current affairs – it dribble.

And which of the presenters on these program’s put forward a conservative perspective?
None. The bias is palpable and needs to be changed. 50% of this country vote “right” and yet none of their views are aired

Seven Sharp makes Holmes look like the BBC. I’d biff out all the shows listed for one decent current affairs programme, with extended hard but fair interviews of the major players in the economy, business and politics. If we are going to own a television system then we should at least have that. If not, just flog it off and be done with it.

Having not seen Seven Sharp, but having seen the show it is based on, The Project, on Channel Ten, I would say that a light hearted look at current affairs is pretty good. The Project is a good show, and it’s not pretending to be a full on current affairs show like 60 minutes (which are usually rubbish with one sided reporting). They take the piss out of everyone equally.
I do hope that Seven Sharp has been made to work well in NZ, because that format does work well in Aussie. It has certainly put Channel 10 back on the map for current affairs.
And over here at least you can watch ABC and SBS for real current affairs.

My perfect current affairs show would include award-winning serious professional journalists from print, TV and radio, and only the best journos, and only the best stories.

The host is not repeat not important to me. I don’t care if a crotchety fat hairy old man in his dressing gown presents it, I don’t give a fuck. In fact I’d prefer a crotchety old fat man in a dressing gown over any current host, bar none. But I don’t care because, to me, “current affairs” does not equal bimbo lightweight bullshit lest audiences get furrowed brows.

Stories like Novopay for example and asking questions like if we already know from Joyce’s leaker briefing paper precisely what the process issues from the ministry’s perspective are and we’re conducting a technical audit to find out that side, why pray tell do we also need an expensive third enquiry who will simply summarise both of those papers into a somewhat more elegant, “high-level” tome? Is it because you want to deflect the heat completely into somewhere else like the consultancy of the four who gave the go-ahead who joins Talent2 as one of the baddies? Is that why you’ve staffed it with an apolitical figure and another from a consultancy?

But who cares what I think, that’s why I’d watch those sort of journalists run stories that matter, because they think of things I would never, and that’s why I haven’t watched a current affairs show for ages. It’s lightweight babbling bullshit aimed at morons. I mean surely someone in the television anatomy realises that the pursuit of such shit as they dish out continually is counter-productive, and is the reason more and more thinking people, high earners, have departed, never to return. Does this not matter to them?

Apparently not. Isn’t that a shame. The rather sad thing is the 7 o’clock slot is the perfect place to start de-dumbing the population – high brow times like Sunday morning is where shows like Seven Duh really belong. But the entire media have got it wrong. For decades now they have chased the dollar. As the classified advertising “rivers of gold” started drying the media have more and more focused on this: the audience aren’t readers/listeners/viewers anymore and haven’t been for some time. In times past we were brains, fed with analysis and “all the news fit to print.” But since all the media changed that definition and we all became “customers,” the media has pursued us like it was selling toothpaste, with the audiences carefully analysed and segmented and fed according to the practiced tried and true marketing-driven segmentations. This switch as anyone alive on or before the 80’s can witness, happened to us then and there is little comparison to the MSM today and then, is there. And it will just get worse. Pity.

As I’ve said before, Kiwis generally speaking don’t give a flying fuck about current affairs, much less politics, even less global ‘movements’. Which you can see clearly in the MSM and the fact so many people are actually taking Labour and the Greens seriously.

Hence the abortion we have on at 7 p.m. I just saw a promo with graphics ‘painted’ on – arrows pointing to what the presenters were talking about. I mean where do they get these people? It looked like a music video from 1988

Reid, what you’ve got here is a bunch of people whose experience of NZ is practically nil. And if they are from the provinces, that was a long time ago. They don’t go back there, they don’t know anyone from there and if they do, they say ‘we should catch up for a beer sometime’ if they see them.

TV1 got rid of all the David Attenborough / BBC content, remember? Who broadcast The Blue Planet? Prime. What’s back on TV1 now? David Attenborough. Hey – memo – this stuff rates!!

Radio NZ have a pro immigration bias (just like the Guardian and Economist). If it was just the national Front who made statements about immigration they would be justified (perhaps) in not reporting them. Along with David Farrar -(National Realestate) they maintain a deafening silence on the findings of the Governments own Savings Working Group. It appears they (as a group of progressive liberals) don’t agree with it.http://www.treasury.govt.nz/publications/reviews-consultation/savingsworkinggroup

The problem with politics is that we vote for parties and parties are able to be subverted by groups (e.g the red “greens”). It then takes precision to flay out the necessary ideas a democracy needs to think about but news programs are influenced by advertisers preferences, time (attention span) and ideology of the particular organization.

Come on David Farrar, most those programs are not proper, quality “current affairs” programs. Such as most stuff broadcast on 60 minutes, 20/20 are over-dramatised, highly emotive or shock-stories, in some cases not even NZ made, or not that relevant to NZ viewers. There was only the very odd good show on 60 minutes on TV3 last year, like the expose on Bronwyn Pullar and the Exit Strategy documentary on ACC. Much of the rest was not much worth viewing.

Sunday is presently not on, as I note, and before it was reduced to half an hour, which is too short. Most of what they showed last year was light, bizarre or emotive contents. Q+A also tends to have a very long break over Christmas and into the new year, and it is generally OK, but apart from that and The Nation (with which I detected a bit of an overly government friendly bias), the other shows on TV3 are mostly focused on overseas issues or stories.

Native Affairs is good with some stories that no other channel but Maori TV shows, but it is primarily targeting just a section of the population.

So this Sharp 7 trash is space that could be used much better for REAL current affairs, rather the nonsensical self-promotion of over-paid moderators and media VIPs.

Once upon a time there were some good programs on television, and some were good nature or history documentaries. TVNZ7 showed some good ones at least, when that was still on FreeView. For current affairs I expect something along the lines of the BBC’s Panorama or whatever else may come near to that. But hey, in NZ it is more like “baked beans from a can” quality for viewing, that we get. Poor and appalling, and it is time to turn the remnants of TVNZ into a couple of real public broadcasting channels again, similar to Australia’s ABC.